The process of design thinking involves the “development of idea stages, applying an iterative process that forces solvers to move back and forth between inspiration, ideation and implementation” (Borja de Mozota & Peinado, 2013, p.1). The design thinker must employ a range of skills to navigate this process including empathy, integrative thinking, optimism, experimentalism, and collaboration (Brown, 2008).
This is underpinned by a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006, 2012) wherein the design thinker perceives his ability not as fixed but flexible, and as something that can be developed through effort. This disposition allows the design thinker to “infer possible new worlds” (Martin, 2009, p.65) or opportunities. The attributes of a design thinker’s mindset (Hassi and Laakso, 2011) are captured in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2. Mindset of a Design Thinker (adapted from Hassi & Laakso, 2011 by Chambers & Brennan, 2018)
In typical problem solving, we generally spend very little time defining the problem and move quickly to the solution searching. However, in design thinking we spend much time defining the problem and we move back and forth between concrete to abstract thinking in the search of inspiration and ideas to tackle the well-defined problem. Once we arrive at a solution to the identified problem, we locate it back in the concrete domain (Goligorsky, 2012). This cycle ensures that the ultimate solution has a problem-solution fit and is situated in the innovation ‘sweetspot’ by being desirable, viable and feasible (IDEO, 2009) (see figure 2). As stated earlier, the process of design thinking involves the ‘development of idea stages, applying an iterative process that forces them to move back and forth between inspiration, ideation and implementation’ (Borja de Mozota & Peinado, 2013, p.1). These are referred to as ‘design thinking spaces’ – inspiration, ideation, and implementation (Brown, 2008), where: Inspiration is the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; Ideation is the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and Implementation is the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives.